San Clemente: More parking near pier?

April 20, 2011

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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San Clemente's Pier Bowl area has a 164-space parking lot, bisected by a street. The City Council this week agreed to take a fresh look at options for increasing parking. A 1989 study suggested regrading and reconfiguring existing lots or cutting into the Pier Bowl slope to creqte a low-lying terraced parking structure. FRED SWEGLES, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

San Clemente's Pier Bowl area has a 164-space parking lot, bisected by a street. The City Council this week agreed to take a fresh look at options for increasing parking. A 1989 study suggested regrading and reconfiguring existing lots or cutting into the Pier Bowl slope to creqte a low-lying terraced parking structure. FRED SWEGLES, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Does San Clemente's often-congested Pier Bowl area need more public parking?

The City Council this week dusted off a 22-year-old parking study of the pier and agreed to take a fresh look at it.

A report prepared in 1989 by Thirtieth Street Architects suggested two ways to add capacity to what now is a 164-space parking lot.

The existing parking could be re-graded and reconfigured to add 36 parking spaces.

The city could cut into the Pier Bowl slope and create terraced parking for up to 400 cars in a low-lying structure that wouldn't impact neighbors' views.

The study was incorporated into a Pier Bowl Specific Plan adopted in 1993, but neither option was ever carried out. Jim Holloway, San Clemente's community development director, said the projected future demand for parking at the pier generated by new development was estimated at the time to be 39 spaces and it was decided the terraced structure wasn't required.

Pier Bowl merchants turned up at Tuesday night's City Council meeting to ask for additional parking. "It's a huge problem," said Bob Novello, manager of the Fisherman's Restaurant.

Council members agreed to place the topic on a future meeting agenda for discussion but didn't set a date. They said Pier Bowl merchants and residents will be notified, and the city will encourage anyone in town who visits the pier to show up and have a say.

"Tread carefully," Councilman Tim Brown cautioned, pointing out that anything proposed in an intensely developed Pier Bowl will be a sensitive issue. Councilman Jim Evert said he would expect some Pier Bowl residents to oppose additional parking, while others inconvenienced by lack of parking would welcome it. Evert said he also would hope to hear from San Clemente residents who either visit the pier or have stopped visiting there because parking is so difficult.

The city has $9 million in a beach parking fund, the city said, and Rick Anderson, president of the Pier Bowl Merchants Association, said if voters want to keep North Beach as-is, as indicated by a March 8 referendum that rejected a proposed Playa del Norte development, parking funds the city had looked at directing there could be redirected to the Pier Bowl..

"You have the opportunity and the area and the money," Pier Bowl businessman John McKinley told the council. He suggested that adding parking at the pier and running a shuttle could help solve the downtown's parking issues, as well.

Speakers described how cars circle the Pier Bowl again and again, unable to find parking. "We've watched where people have had fist fights on the street to try and control parking spaces, or people putting stuff out to block spaces to be able to have their relatives come down to visit them," McKinley said.

Holloway told the council that, in 1993 dollars, a 400-space terrace with subterranean spaces would have cost $5.4 million and a reconfigured surface lot adding 36 spaces would have cost $400,000. Today the costs would be far higher, he acknowledged, although a terraced structure would be somewhat smaller and wouldn't yield 400 spaces because a portion of the site envisioned in 1989 has been since been developed as Park Semper Fi.

Councilman Bob Baker suggested looking at other options like offering cheaper parking rates at Linda Lane's beach parking lot to encourage more parking there, within walking distance north of the pier.

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